The simple fact is whether you recognize it or not – your Credit staff are in contact with your customers more than anyone else in the business, and if they are trained and educated like they should be they also care more about your customers (who they would see as their customers) than most other people in the business.
If you see your Credit function merely as a debt collection role you could be missing out on some great opportunities. By definition your credit controllers spend a large part of their day dealing with queries, disputes and complaints. This can be viewed as a negative or as with anything else in this world it can be viewed as a real positive as well.
Whatever goes wrong in your business from wrong product delivered, damages, pricing issues, unhappiness with the service received, false promises made by sales reps eager to make the sale. Issues with Purchase Orders, Contracts, shipping, discount rates, rebates, order entry or anything else including IT issues, all have one thing in common – they will all end up on a credit controller’s desk at some time in the form of a disputed or unpaid invoice.
You see, your credit staff know everything that is going on in your business, and they know everything that is going wrong as well. Question is: have you spoken to them lately? Have you a system that reviews all the queries and disputes received on a daily, weekly or monthly basis?
If you answered “No” to either of these questions you could be missing an amazing opportunity. Talk to your credit staff before you ever engage business consultants – they know the real story. If you are the frustrated Credit Controller or Credit Manager in the company who is nodding in agreement with everything I have said and think “If only they would listen” – give them a copy of this article to read and get their feedback.
Now to get to the subject of the article, most problems that exist, most queries that you deal with, most disputes you encounter, all have one thing in common. They come about as a result of poor internal communications. If there is a pricing dispute a different price was communicated to the person in the customers AP department to the price entered by the person responsible for updating the price files in your company – no matter how many steps exist between these two people – it is a communications issue.
In fact, every single issue or problem that exists in your company today could be put down to poor communications.
The person who gets all this information first hand – the Credit person
The person who has to sort it out – the Credit person
The person who knows who to go to – the Credit person
The person that will finish the job 100% - the Credit person
The person that feels most of the pain when things go wrong and has to clean up after everyone else – the Credit person, so if this is true for you can you think of anyone else who is more qualified for the role of Head of Internal (and maybe even external!) Communications.
All your staff have a lot more to offer than they are currently allowed to contribute, it is time to make some changes that will put the customer at the front and centre of everything you do and by taking these issues seriously you are demonstrating your commitment to delivering excellence to your customers in a meaningful way and not just some glib slogan dreamt up by a PR agency.
If you agree with what I am saying and think you would benefit from some training in the area, drop me a line to [email protected] or phone me on 087 244 7052. I am happy to help in any way I can.